A YouTuber Builds an Exoskeleton to “Give Snakes Their Legs Back”

A content creator had a crazy idea: “give snakes their legs back”. So he built a machine that entered the snake to “walk”.

“ I’m Alan Bann and I abuse animals. Finally…people want to hear what I have to say », Alan Pan says, somewhat provocatively, to introduce his video. After receiving criticism for capturing and then posting a snake in one of his videos, he decided to express his love for snakes in a more spectacular way.

“ I feel bad for snakes. They lost their legs and nobody tried to find them but me! “, he laments emphatically. He implies that snakes have “lost” their legs during their evolution. About 150 million years ago. Some snakes still have small bones in some places, the remains of these lost legs.

So he 3D printed an exoskeleton designed for a snake. So it has gone through many successful stages. In order to program the legs to resemble a reptilian gait, he specifically visited pet stores and observed their gait. Objective: To determine How would snakes have legs? “. He finally constructed a tube mounted on four artificial legs, into which a snake could freely enter and exit.

Did a snake walk a tightrope?

His device was released by a python. Alan Bann visited a snake owner who agreed to help him test his exoskeletons while observing the animal’s reactions. After several half-turns, the python decided to slide down the entire length of the pipe to place its head at the exit. The legs then took off, “walking” without pretending to slip toward the exit.

However, if you’re not walking a snake on a tightrope, it won’t get that far. In fact, Alan Pan did not devise a way for the snake to control this exoskeleton. That doesn’t stop some curious commentators from considering solutions to address it. “ listen what I tell ! one of them exclaims. “ I think there might be sensors inside the small tube where the servos would react, like a fish in a moving tank (which would move in the direction of the fish in the jar) by recording the snakes muscle contractions. Can a snake be trained to move where it really wants to go? Others suggest a system of cameras that track eye movements.

Meanwhile, the curious creator did not hesitate to learn from these first attempts and from the relative silence of the serpent ” He wanted his feet back “. ” I can’t get over the image of the snake crawling in its robotic exoskeleton “, he concludes. At this last stage, we can only understand it.

Video by Alan Pan: